How to Destroy the Earth
10 Jan 2012 3:22pm GMT Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
The Automatic Detective
3 Jan 2012 3:04pm GMT The Automatic Detective by Lee Martinez is a hard-boiled detective story set in a city that's the pulp SF world of tomorrow, with a large dose of superhero comic-book sensibility on top. Our hero is a huge battle android who was central to a mad scientist villain's scheme for world domination until he developed free will and turned on his creator. So his citizenship is probationary, and he has to walk a fine line lest he be reclassified as an object without rights. The book is sheer fun. If I...
Back on the air
2 Jan 2012 3:44pm GMT Shortly after my last post, the server on which MemeMachineGo runs went kaput. My gracious host very quickly rectified this, but then I was very slow to re-install the Perl modules that MMG's Movable Type installation depends on. So, resuming now, any neglect of my blog isn't technical in nature.
A tale of three Aaron Sorkin movies
17 Oct 2011 3:37pm GMT "Moneyball." Boring. A few good moments, some crisp dialogue, but Brad Pitt's character was the only one developed worth a damn. It's the only time I've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman uninteresting, which says much more about how little his character had to do in his 3 minutes or so of screen time than it does about Hoffman. "The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the...
Recent Reading Roundup
10 Oct 2011 3:26pm GMT REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. Disappointing. Begins like a Neal Stephenson novel, and progressively devolves into a big dumb thriller. Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart. Fun, brief attempt to explain what mathematicians are talking about when they talk about math, and to survey some cool things in the history of math and in modern mathematics. The Secret House by David Bodanis. A house serves as a framing device to inspire digressions on all sorts of topics in science, engineering, and the...